I sincerely have NO idea where Jon was going with the Angela Merkel thing. Late stage Diet Coke poisoning, I suspect.

Babylon 5 had a per-episode budget of about $800,000. Adjusted for inflation to 2017 dollars that’s about $1.32 million. The first season of Game of Thrones had a budget of $6 million/episode, and the final season is up to $15 mission. Imagine what the show could look like with today’s technology and that kind of budget!

(in our Season 1 Wrap-Up episode, dropping in early December, we will play the inevitable casting game. Stay tuned, true believers!)

Is the “Mars wanting to be independent” sci-fi trope a projection of the American Revolution? It seems to share a lot of the same elements.

“Things were different in the south” is a saying from our grad school advisor, Dr. Joseph Lynch, who maintained this was true no matter where you were speaking of. The second of Lynch’s Laws was “Whatever you can imagine, however perverse, someone somewhere has tried it and liked it.” I don’t recall much from my years in the Ohio State University history department, but those words have stayed with me.

It was actually Blaise Pascal who, it is believed, was first responsible for the quote about “I wrote a long letter because I did not have time to write a short one.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Franklin or Twain claimed to have coined it though; never trusted those two.

Ron Canada, who played Captain Pierce here, was also in the 1998 David Hasslehoff vehicle Nick Fury, Agent of Shield. Also he apparently plays an admiral in The Orville, which I consider a step down from that. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0133474/?ref_=nv_sr_1